Quethera Ltd, a privately funded gene therapy company based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, has obtained a grant from the Wellcome Trust Pathfinder Award Scheme. Quethera was founded in 2013 to treat glaucoma using gene therapy. It received seed funding last year from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund and Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge.

Dr Peter S. Widdowson, CEO and co-Founder of Quethera said “we are absolutely delighted to receive this award which will further assist in the optimisation and design of our novel gene construct aimed at preventing further sight loss in patients with glaucoma.”

Keith Martin, Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Cambridge and co-Founder of Quethera said “we are very pleased that the Wellcome Trust has recognised the value of our work and we appreciate this support as we continue to develop new therapies that will make a real difference to the lives of people losing vision due to glaucoma.”

The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health, supporting bright minds in science, the humanities and the social sciences, as well as education, public engagement and the application of research to medicine. Its investment portfolio gives it the independence to support such transformative work as the sequencing and understanding of the human genome, research that established front-line drugs for malaria, and Wellcome Collection, a free venue for the incurably curious that explores medicine, life and art.